Travel Time
I’m one of the many people who complains frequently about tedium and inconvenience being unfun. I have limited playtime now that I’m married, with many of my sessions capping out at an hour or less. Any time there is a time sink introduced into a game that I see little value in, I get extremely frustrated. The more often that happens, the sooner I am likely to quit playing a game entirely. It’s a wonder, then, that I don’t have a problem with travel time.
Actually, I do have a problem with travel time in some games in that I feel it’s too short. What I don’t have a problem with is the idea of long travel times between locations that are geographically distant. Why? At this point, I still only have theories. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t entirely add up to what I normally consider my play style preferences (I like immediate gratification, I don’t have much time to play, etc.). I’m hoping some of you have theories about travel time. Why do you like it? Why do you dislike it? Why does it belong (or not belong) in an MMO?
Do I simply tolerate travel time because it doesn’t disrupt my enjoyment frequently enough to make me quit (Lengthy Parenthetical Tangent: This is part of a theory I like to call, as of 30 seconds ago, the Disruption Frequency Quotient–any time a player’s enjoyment of a game experience is disrupted, he becomes less likely to pursue enjoyment in the same game. If Enjoyment Disruptions / Total Time = Too High [some number I've yet to bother inventing], the player will quit)?
Or, do I actually like travel time? As with most things, it’s probably some combination of both. I do believe that having some travel time in your world makes the world feel bigger. Instant travel removes that size of the world from the experience entirely for me, and for me it cheapens the game. I like to explore and find my way to places in the world. I like to navigate through scary locations and feel like I accomplished something by getting through to greener pastures.
Strangely enough, I don’t even have a problem with doing this more than once. There is some point at which I become tired of making the trek, but it must not come as quickly for me as some people. What I’m saying is that, while I am okay with the idea that after you’ve gotten somewhere the “hard way” once, you can get back there quickly from then on, I’m still not the biggest fan of it. Or, perhaps I’m just not the biggest fan of how it’s been implemented in games so far.
In some games (see: WoW), I just need someone who can summon me to some distant land where I can somehow bind myself (e.g. Talk to Griffon tamer) and completely bypass the effort involved in getting to the place. But at least in games like World of Warcraft, I have to physically transport through the world. In some games, I can instantaneously transport places I’ve been to or, in some cases, I can instantly transport to places I’ve never even been. I loathe the latter example the most.
Back to the original question: Why do I like having travel time? What the hell is my problem? Why am I okay with it despite my massive lack of playtime? Heck, I don’t know, I’m just taking stabs in the dark right now.
Perhaps one of the reasons is that increased travel times can actually make me stay in one place for much longer. Why is that good? Well, I’m much more likely to get attached to that place. If I’m there each time I log in and each time I log out for a good week or more, it will hold a larger place in my heart than if I can just zip around everywhere all willy-nilly. Maybe I’m just delusional and that’s not even one of the reasons I like travel time.
Maybe I like it because it can enhance a community? With longer travel times, people tend to establish just a few places to congregate and meet up rather than scattering all over the globe (or they have many locations to meet in micro-communities rather than one huge server community). This seems to strengthen the bonds that players have with one another and with the place that these meetings occur. On one of the servers I played on in EverQuest, that was East Commonlands. On another, that place was North Freeport. Was that an issue of travel time, though, or was it because there was no formalized auction house and people had to find a common location to buy and sell?
I suppose this is a decent stopping point. I’d like to see what other people think about travel time and the pros and cons related to long and short travel, and maybe I’ll continue theorizing with a follow-up post in the future.
I’m sure there is some solution out there that will allow us to get most of the benefits from having both long and short travel times, but those need to be identified before they can be achieved. Maybe making players connect-the-dots with portals or travel points would help do the trick–you can’t bind to the portal in Location Y without first binding to the portal in Location X or Z, so you can’t be summoned by a high level buddy and bind immediately. Maybe you have to travel from point to point in succession even if there is relatively instant transport (Asheron’s Call). We’ll see if anyone has any solutions out there, or if the best solution is already implemented in an MMO out there.
The original EQ, up through Velious, to me was the golden age of travel time. I know some people hated it, and Verant/Sony had so many problems with the boats… but besides the technical aspect, I really do believe that travel time helped create the community that EQ had and that many subsequent games, even EQ after the Planes of Power expansion, can’t seem to generate.
The main thing travel time did was to cause you to seriously consider going somewhere. I tell people I spent 5 levels in the Estate of Unrest because it was fun, and it was, but it also was because once I’d made the journey to Faydwer, crossing the Ocean of Tears, I didn’t want to make that journey alot. So, I stayed in Unrest and worked on my faction with the dwarves (yay sneak!) and traveled back to Freeport to visit the monk’s guild when I’d leveled or when I had the money to make going to the East Commonlands bazaar worth my while.
One time, determined to find the best fishing spot in all of Norrath, I had a druid drop me in Steamfont and I “walked” from there to Toxxuila. The world was just huge.
I suppose that the World of Warcraft is pretty huge too, and the flight path system does mean I have to walk everywhere at least once. But much like EQ after the Planes of Power, travel is so easy that from day to day its hard to run into the same people. In EQ, the guilds I joined were because of people I met and played with in the same dungeons over and over. We chatted, got along, played well, and either they invited me or I invited them. In WoW, the guilds I have join have been either completely random invites in town, after a single instance run, or because of people I met in EQ.
Overall, the WoW style of travel actually tends to divide people more than not since if you meet in town to form a group for an instance, and then find one of your members can’t fly to the nearest point, you have to decide to either boot them from the group, travel to the point they can fly to and run with them, or tell them you’ll meet them and fly your separate ways.
Personally, I’d love to see a game designed around a single central city and the adventuring world radiate out from it (with maybe a few tiny tiny villages in outlying lands). To use WoW as an example, take the cities that exist and make one huge city, but keep the entirety of the existing cities. Don’t make just one warrior guild, have six of them, and six auction houses and six or more banks and six huge city gates, each one leading out to its wedge of the world-wheel and difficulty follows distance, the further from the city, the harder the monsters. If the travel gets to be too far, put an outpost (not a city) and allow flight paths from the gate to the outpost, or something. Of course, this would work best for a PvE game. For PvP, you might need two cities and change up the design a little.
The big thing is, even in WoW, players congregate. On each faction, Alliance and Horde, one city is much more heavily populated than the others.
Travelling is a huge thing for me…I love it.
When a new expansion / zone comes out..unlike most of the other players (I would assume) that are hankering after the new loot..I just can’t wait to get in to explore. I still use my legs when I have time and don’t have to be there a.s.a.p for a group…and one of the funniest most favourite times in EQ1…when my 7th level dwarvern warrior, Udrath thought he would swim to Freeport from BBM….little did I know that there of course would be a zone edge and it wouldn’t be possible. 2 real life days I spent swimming around that bloody ocean
I enjoy getting to a location the hard way at least once. It makes me appreciate the destination more once I get there. Plus, as I push through the wild on my own, there’s a certain rush. Will I encounter something difficult over the next hill? Will I find a cave/castle/ruin that no one has found yet? Will I see something interesting? I think it’s these questions that mitigate the tedium of travel time.
Fast travel in Asheron’s Call was a good compromise. You could still cross the world pretty quickly, but not instantly, and that effort encouraged you to stay in a location at least for a little while. Acquiring the Teleport spell later on was a nice badge of achievement, and a great example of using in-game lore to solve an out-of-game technical problem.
For me, travel time is one of the necessary “evils”. Instant gratification isn’t the right phrase. The time to fun ratio isn’t about walking to a mob and hearing that all too loved “ding” and moving on to the next. It is about approaching a reasonably difficult challenge and succeeding with a reasonable chance of failure after a reasonable amount of work within a reasonable amount of time. It all comes down to feeling like you earned the rewards, the level, or whatever. Travel is a challenge just like any other challenge in a game instant gratification makes that challenge meaningless.
I always enjoyed travel times. First off, it really made the world feel big. Knowing that it could take me hours to travel from a city on one side of the world to a city on the other side of the world just made me appreciate all the work that went into the creation of that world all the more.
Back in EQ, I made more friends sitting on the docks waiting for the boats than I did in dungeons I think. While waiting for the boat to arrive, you really didn’t have anything more to do than to chat with the others waiting for the boat. So, I got to meet people, find out what they were up to and learn about places I had yet to see. Some of those friends became frequent adventuring companions. Some became guild mates.
I also loved the exploration part of travel. When I would walk around a mountain and see a new sight for the first time, I would almost always stop for a few minutes and just enjoy the view. Back in the day, if I could have clicked on a book and almost instantly gone from Kelethin to Kunark, for example, I would never have seen the chessboard in Butcherblock Mountains. If I could have clicked from Greater Faydark to Odus, I would never have seen the wall carvings on the road from High Hold.
People get too wrapped up in hunting for loot and leveling as fast as they can and don’t spend nearly enough time enjoying the world that they are in. Not too long before I quit EQ, I met a level 75 monk whose starting city was Qeynos, but who had never actually been to Qeynos Hills or any of the Karanas. His home was actually in the Plane of Knowledge and he only went to Qeynos when he had to.
The easier these games become and the more the worlds shrink in the name of convenience… I don’t know… I just think something gets lost.
I’m with Thermoses. Exploration is fun; new sights to see. After a while though, traveling from point A to point B for the umpteenth time is not exploration. After I moved to Toronto, the first couple of trips on the subway was novel and interesting. Eight years later, I’m on autopilot the entire way.
Exploration and variation makes travel time fun - i.e. if the road and environment is new or if there are interesting things happening during the travel.
If the mobs and the environment are the same always and not affecting me in any significant way I could probably skip it after a few times.
Too many variables to determine a general (dis)like for travel time.
Looking at myself, I do dislike travel times most of the time, but I knowingly put myself into a position where it is prolonged. I play lots of alts, I’ve deleted and rerolled characters more than a few times, and I play with adventurer experience turned off (EQ2, of course). This means I’m reliant on quests, many of which can send me all over the same area just for the purpose of slowing me down with travel time, but also that I don’t obtain the ‘faster’ methods of travel (mounts and faster speed buffs mostly, but ports on some level). In fact, my travel time is for all intents and purposes fairly exaggerated.
I recognize this as being a result of my playstyle, but still wish there was a way that I could further eliminate travel time with my rerolled, questing, low-level characters.
Looking back I think EQ1 had travel right. Why new MMO’s got rid of port classes is beyond me :/
I’ve always despised class-based porting ability. It just makes people feel less than others for an ability completely outside of the overall balance of the class. I feel that if you have speed or port abilities, they should be capable of being obtained by everyone, even if it’s through item use. Such as fast mounts to match the speed of bards and better porting options from existing but typically limited global porting spots from questing.
Note that travel time suddenly means a more realistic economy, too, assuming you can trade things worth buying. See EVE for a prime example of how difficulty transporting goods leads directly to an interesting market.
I don’t mind WoW’s travel time, although i do wish there was one change: flying should continue if I log out, instead of suspending me mid-flight. I could even approve of a vast MMOworld where long distance travelling is generally only undertaken while logged out .. no instant travel, people stay in communities while playing …
[...] I’m not saying that travel time should not exist. On the contrary, I quite like travel time. But it can and should be used in the right ways, such as to create a sense of scale in the world, [...]